


Learning Curve

by keysmash



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: 14valentines, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-09
Updated: 2010-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 03:26:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysmash/pseuds/keysmash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So when her mom still refused to budge, Jo did the only thing left: she ran away from home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Learning Curve

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 14valentines. Set between [Measure my footsteps as I blow through this town](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/380966.html) and [Try, try, try to understand](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/351208.html), although it stands alone; also set between No Exit and Born Under A Bad Sign. Spoilers for Jo's s2 arc.

For all Dean's talk about amateurs, it wasn't as if she could take a class on hunting or anything. Most of Jo's contacts were actually her mom's contacts, and she learned, after calling up a handful, that the guys who hadn't already helped her were too scared of Ellen to do something as obvious as training her daughter. Don't piss off the one who pours your drinks, and all. She posted requests on Craigslist for a while, which was all she could think to do, but she only got sexual propositions back, no matter how vague or clear she was, and so she gave up on that fast. Eventually she ran out of ways to hunt in a way that she and her mom they could both live with, and was left with ideas that only she'd like.

So when her mom still refused to budge, Jo did the only thing left: she ran away from home.

She had useful skills, she knew that. She knew all about running the bar, from dealing with customers to ordering shit from vendors to the basic drudgery of cleaning up every night, and she'd gotten Ash to agree, before she left, to be her fake boss if she gave people his number as a reference. He wouldn't promise he wouldn't tell her mom, but she hadn't expected him to hold out on that front forever, anyway. She could use her high school algebra teacher as another reference if she really needed to, but she wasn't planning on taking too many real jobs.

She knew the basics of how to hunt. For all her mom might talk a good game about not wanting to get too deep into the lifestyle, she could research obscure lore like no one else Jo had ever met. She'd helped her do it a few times, as favors for hunters who tipped well and never hit on either of them, and she wasn't as good as her mom, but she'd learned a lot.

She knew the stuff she'd be going after, at least at first. She'd heard these stories for as far back as she could remember, first as what she thought were fairy tales and then later as fish stories in the bar, and she'd already heard about stuff she'd hadn't done yet. And, regardless of what her mom thought, she knew well enough how to tell when things were out of her league. She had a list of people she could call for backup or for advice, and she wasn't looking to get herself killed.

Her mom didn't see the sense behind any of this, though, so Jo quietly packed her bags, and got her cash together, and then left. She got three calls before she crossed the first state line, and then another seven before she stopped for the night. Jo knew Ash could pin her based on her phone, so she didn't answer until she reached the town with the job, which looked to be a spirit.

"Hey Mom," she finally answered, sitting on the room's only bed. She'd been waiting for this call, after getting ready for bed.

Ellen let out a huge, deep breath and then started cursing. "Goddammit, Joanna, you had better have a good reason for not answering my calls, and it'd better not be what I think it is. You'd better have run off to Cancun or snuck off to have an abortion or something, girl."

Jo rolled her eyes. "There's a spirit, Mom, and I —"

"Jo," she cut in, hard and sharp. "I thought you knew better than this."

"I know just fine," she said. "I checked this one all out before I came. All I have to do is check what I know with what the witness says, and then deal with the remains."

"It is not ever that simple," she said. "What happens when the witness gives you something that means all your ideas are wrong? You don't know what they're gonna say, and these things can get messy fast."

"Then I'll deal with that then," Jo said. They'd had this conversation a thousand times since the job in Philadelphia. "Look, I'm gonna be fine. I'm going to get some sleep, Mom."

"You call me when you're done," her mom said. "And you call if you need help. Doesn't have to be me, but you call someone."

She sighed. Like she didn't know that already. "Night, Mom," she said, and then hung up before Ellen could keep going. She double checked the lock on the door and then crawled between the sheets. She could hear the people on either side of her, one room talking and the other watching TV, and it wasn't the right kind of noise. Jo turned on the TV as well and finally fell asleep with a _Lifetime_ movie on in the background.

Her mom was wrong, it turned out — the witness corroborated everything. She was done interviewing with more than enough time to grab lunch and then change into a skirt to go visit the graveyard. She bought a small bouquet of flowers on the way, to leave at a random gravestone, and then scoped out the grave she needed, and the best ways in and out.

Jo napped, she had dinner at the same diner where she ate lunch, and then she changed clothes again. Breaking into the cemetery was the easy part, but pretty soon, Jo was left staring down at the neatly-kept grass over the grave, and realizing she had no idea how to go about this by herself. The one job she'd done before now that involved digging up a grave had been a team effort, and the work had been almost fun, taken a little bit at a time with people to talk to all the while. She looked around the place now, made sure she was really alone, then shrugged and dug in.

She trashed the sod. There must be some way to get it up in neat pieces that could go back together when she was done, but she hadn't paid too much attention to that at the time. It hadn't seemed important until she found herself faced with a pile of shredded grass and roots. After that, of course, nothing was left but six feet of dirt, compacted by time and foot traffic.

Jo didn't get a foot deep before she realized just how much this would suck. She'd brought gloves, yeah, but they just held her sweat against her palms, eventually keeping them wet and tender, and every stab of the shovel hurt. Everything hurt — her hands, her arms, her shoulders, her back, her thighs, her feet — and finally she stopped digging the entire length of the grave and just worked on a small hole at the end nearest the headstone. She didn't have much room to work once she climbed into the hole and kept digging down, but it was faster going, so she kept with it.

She thought she was exhausted by the time she reached the coffin, but she still had to break through the wood, which was strong for being almost a hundred years old, and then crouch down to make sure she got accelerant on the entire corpse, even the parts she hadn't directly dug up. After that, there was setting the thing on fire and letting it burn out and refilling the grave (mostly she pushed clods of dirt towards the hole, on her hands and knees) and spreading the sod around on top and getting the hell out of there. She counted herself damn lucky that she hadn't been caught, and that the spirit hadn't shown up.

The sun was rising by the time Jo got back to her truck. She left smudges of dirt on everything she touched, and she caught herself almost dozing off at a stoplight on the way back to the motel. She knew she should get out of town before the cemetery reported the desecration, but it was all she could do to keep herself awake long enough to get to the room. Next time, she told herself, she was getting espresso on the way out.

She at least hid the shovel before she went into the room. She would have crawled straight into bed if there had been more than one, but there wasn't, so she showered as quickly as possible — not very, what with having dirt and ash and sweat caking into some awful kind of mud all over her body — and then lay down.

She didn't wake up until it was dark outside again, and her entire body hurt badly enough that, if she wasn't ravenous, she would have stayed in bed.

Instead, she ordered a pizza, drank as much water as she could manage, and took more Advil than the label said she should. The delivery guy, a teenager who hadn't met her eyes, was the only human contact she'd had all day. Jo ate in bed, with the same movie from two nights before playing in the background. Her phone was on the bedside table, on silent, and she picked it up and just held it, without seeing if she'd missed any calls.

She slipped the phone into the waistband of the boxers she slept in when she got up to wash her face, and she kept it there when she went to her bag and dug for the paperback King novel she'd brought. She'd be paying the same for the room whether she checked out now or in the morning, so she was staying put for the night. The rooms on either side of her were silent tonight and Jo held the phone in her hand for a moment, just thinking. None of the fish stories mentioned exactly how much an anticlimax sucked.

She dropped _The Shining_ back into the bag, about to flip open the phone and call, and the slight impact of the book was enough to make the papers of research she'd brought flutter. She glanced at the top sheet again, a list of victims in her own hand that stretched back through decades of death and loss, and then she smiled to herself. She'd stopped that: that was over, because of her. Jo sent her mom a text — _finished up, went fine, heading out in the morning_ — and then took her book back to bed. No one was here to rag on it for being inaccurate, or for being pop-culture garbage, and she sank down into the pillows as she opened it up.


End file.
